"Did you really know Francis Bacon?" I am sometimes asked, as if it was something special. But it wasn't.
We met because I offered for sale a one bedroomed studio house that I had designed and part built north of Andover, in Hampshire.
He had seen my "One bedroom studio house in Hampshire for sale" in the Daily Telegraph newspaper.
He read it, came to see it, and bought it.
We got on famously, I think probably because I was not gay, and thus different from his general crowd of friends and hangers-on, and that we were both firm believers in change.
I had bought the house as a tumbledown wreck from a Mrs Rampling (Mrs Ramp).
Its land and mouldy thatch were to be my roots in England after I had travelled the world drawing in 1958 and 1959.
Mrs Ramp lived next door in a cottage with a real and lovely cottage garden. Night soil from a bucket nourished it, especially her runner beans.
She owned an old gardening book called The English Flower Garden, 1901 edition. In it was an engraving of my grandfather The Rev F. Page-Roberts admiring his 12 ft eremurus flowers with a two page text on their cultivation.
Mrs Ramp was so pleased to have a grandson neighbour of a men, also President of The National Rose Society, next door, that she offered it as a gift, or a garishly painted depiction of Mont Ventoux, given to her by Francis Bacon.
I suppose because of our friendship or joint pleasure in the garden, and now connections with her much treasured garden book, that I chose the book rather than the painting.
The book, is now part of the family archive. And the painting? Well, it may have been a Bacon - worth a million or so - or maybe not.
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